Richler Quotes & Sayings
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In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. — Mordecai Richler

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony. — Mordecai Richler

Better my right hand should have been cut off. Go know I was setting in motion events that would lead to the ruin of one of the few truly good men I ever met. — Mordecai Richler

Yes, in the feverish dance of dust, she thinks, there is surely a speck of Zachariah. Even in his absence, in so many ways, he is so very much here. — Emma Richler

Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful of the country because we always seemed so far behind style-setting New York, I now thank God for the cultural lag. Ours, after all, is the good neighbourhood. A society well worth preserving. — Mordecai Richler

She pursued his lips,' Zach laughs. 'Another one I misread! Pursued for "pursed." You know. She pursed her lips. So whenever you do that now, reach out and touch my lips to shut me up? I think, she pursued his lips.'
'That's so silly,' smiles Rachel.
'I know that. Now I'm pursuing your lips,' he adds.
When Zach kisses her, Rachel is often aware of the pulse in his lower labial, a small heartbeat there. She is aware of a pulsing and a slight thickening of tissue. How many times has this boy bled from his mouth? How many times. — Emma Richler

Do you think she'd mind if, after the dinner, I slipped out for an hour and maybe caught the third period in the Forum?'
'Brides tend to be touchy about things like that. — Mordecai Richler

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print. — Mordecai Richler

Listen your Lordship, I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn't inhale. — Mordecai Richler

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there. — Mordecai Richler

Ernst was still in the Eastern Zone, about ninety kilometres from Berlin, when the truck emerged so inexplicably out of nowhere that it seemed to have been created by the rain itself. — Mordecai Richler

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world. — Mordecai Richler

In, 1950, at the age, 19 I dropped out of St. George William College in Montreal, as it then was, and sailed for England on the Franconia. Foolishly, no arrogantly, believing I could put Canada and its picayune problems behind me, never dreaming it would become the raw material of most of my fiction and non-fiction. Or that I would care so deeply about its surviving intact. — Mordecai Richler

I thought, breaking into a sweat, I'd better call Saul. I owe Kate an apology ... Damn damn damn. — Mordecai Richler

The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule. — Mordecai Richler

Shame on you. Don't tell me you've been married for an hour and you've already got eyes for another woman. — Mordecai Richler

Marry me, Rachel.'
'Not yet.'
'Tomorrow, Rachel. Marry me.'
'Maybe tomorrow.'
'There is no common blood between us. Say it,' pleads Zachariah.
'There is no common blood between us,' murmurs Rachel.
'I am not your brother.'
'I know.'
He traces her face with his swollen fingers, across the brow bones and down the zygomatics, and along the jaw from earlobe to chin, sweeping away the brine as he goes.
'I am your Wolff,' he says.
'And I am your Wolff,' she replies.
Let the day begin. — Emma Richler

Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water. — Mordecai Richler

You know how there are words that never really - they are never really quite right. You can't quite trust them. Use them. You know. Without pause.'
'There are words I stare at,' Zach says. 'Strange. Every time. Misled, that's one. I see mizzled. And unshed. I read unched.'
'Me too! But that's a different thing - except, now you mention it, it's odd about unshed, that it's only for tears. Mostly. Hardly ever blood, for instance, you don't see unshed blood. Unched. Not really.'
'Not in my case anyway. Mine sheds all over the joint! I'm a bleeder all right. — Emma Richler

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence. — Mordecai Richler

Some of the attitudes of Barney are certainly attitudes I share, but not all. — Mordecai Richler

There are ten commandments, right? Well, it's like an exam. You get eight out of ten, you're just about top of the class. — Mordecai Richler

Everybody writes a book too many. — Mordecai Richler

Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view. — Mordecai Richler

We'll be up in a minute,' states Katya, speaking from a particular stillness, in sudden recognition of a dream made real, a dream annulled, so she had thought, by long words of the womb - 'endometriosis,' 'hyperplasia' - and now made true, this vision of a boy on a staircase answering to his name, coming to her call. My son. She raises one arm slightly in front of Lev at her side, in gentle impediment. Not yet. Wait here. Let me see. This was always preordained. — Emma Richler

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn't to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. — Mordecai Richler

Cripples are not the stuff of romance. Only Lord Byron, dragging his club foot, springs to mind as an exception to the rule, but such a failing in a man is regarded as interesting, even provocative, rather than disfiguring. Women must submit to a more exacting measure. — Mordecai Richler

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit. — Mordecai Richler

Where his boyhood retreat had been a cave hewn for one, it now accommodated two. He was suddenly two and it amazed and delighted, causing a stir in the pit of him, a kind of fibrillation. — Emma Richler

The Canadian kid who wants to grow up to be Prime Minister isn't thinking big, he is setting a limit to his ambitions rather early. — Mordecai Richler

Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel, casting a practised eye over the back of his head and down the length of him, from the shoulder blades where his wings once grew, epochs ago, in some other guise: angel - guardian, avenging - or great vagrant bird - Daurian Jackdaw, Chimney Swift, Pacific Loon! — Emma Richler

Hell! His beard grows fast as blazes, like a damp wicket in springtime sun, green, and Rachel's skin is so fine, his bristles can score her red the way a new ball marks a bat, English alum on English unbleached willow, finest quality, special selection, Rachel-grade. Zach, my man, you have cricket on the brain! Thomas has asked him to play on Sunday. Bring Rachel, he said. Thomas 'All Souls' Aubry, gentleman, corinthian at heart, and half French yet more English than a true-born. — Emma Richler

A boy can be two, three, four potential people, but a man is only one. He murders the others. — Mordecai Richler

I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life ... — Mordecai Richler

Even very great things, he meant, can't last forever. Or beautiful things, I suppose. Those too. Things that don't really need replacing except because they fall apart. — Emma Richler

Wherever I travel I'm too late. The orgy has moved elsewhere, — Mordecai Richler

Actually, when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene, nobody outdoes Canadians, myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation. — Mordecai Richler

But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial. — Mordecai Richler

Rachel believes in it, the laws of of pattern formation and how they are universal: whatever she sees, crystallizing, a landscape of fractals, of emergence and symmetry, her world falling happily into shape where he must forge it, a pioneer of industry, sooty and scarred. For Rachel Wolff, quite simply, there are patterns everywhere, she can't help it; she is an illustrator, naturalist, cartographer - and her eye, a kaleidoscope. — Emma Richler

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent. — Mordecai Richler

I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks. — Mordecai Richler

The older she grows, the farther she walks. It is a good thing the world is round and she is fond of walking in circles or else she might disappear across three times nine countries in the thirtieth tsardom! — Emma Richler

For the record, pot, like the Reader's Digest , is not necessarily habit-forming, but both can lead to hard-core addiction : heroin, in one case, abridged bad books, in the other. Either way you look at it, a withdrawal from a meaningful life. — Mordecai Richler

Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self- apology. — Mordecai Richler

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside. — Mordecai Richler

McEwan's Atonement ... truly dazzles, proving to be as much about the art and morality of writing as it is about the past ... . The middle section of Atonement, the two vividly realized set pieces of Robbie's trek to the Channel and Briony's experiences with the wounded evacuees of Dunkirk, would alone have made an outstanding novel ... . There is wonderful writing throughout as McEwan weaves his many themes - the accidents of contingency, the sins of absent fathers, class oppression - into his narrative, and in a magical love scene. — Noah Richler

A year later, there is another miscarriage, another lost boy, and then an operation, and Rachel is in a muddle. Another missed carriage, she hears, conjuring a vision of Mama in a typical dash from the house, hurrying for trains to other cities where she will conduct music and choirs. Rachel sees Katya on a railway platform, suitcase and baton box in hand, but Mama is too late, the train hurtles by, screaming through the arches, a great train of missed carriages. Rachel's night-time wish is granted then, that though Katya has left her once again, she must return home as quickly. She has missed her carriage.
'Mama,' Rachel whispers into the night bedroom air, 'Mama, hurry home! — Emma Richler

All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself. — Mordecai Richler

I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence. — Emma Richler

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed. — Mordecai Richler

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation."
But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent. — Mordecai Richler

There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert. — Mordecai Richler

What notion did you have of Canada when you came?" Mistry smile delicately, the face behind the trimmed beard and glasses like that of a student. "I thought it would complete me. — Noah Richler

But it's so silly, Mama!' pipes Zach, protesting with all the might of his twelve-year-old bellows and leaping to his feet, chest puffed, to fling a proprietary arm around his sister who fits so neatly in the crook of him, as if wrought for this place. He speaks for them both, though Rachel is some months his elder. — Emma Richler

What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be. ... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists ... . Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying ... - than anything McEwan has written ... .sublimely written narrative ... . The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own. ... — Noah Richler

I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic. — Emma Richler

I need to tell you a story.'
What about?
Zachariah, Zachariah, my foundling boy. 'A boy. A boxer, a fighting man. A brother. No. About brothers, sisters. Foundlings, laid-in-the-streets. Fights, fighting. A boy, it all begins with the boy. My love. A wolf. Peter and the Wolf! Oh dear! I am very crazy! Let me - I must tell you this story.'
Why?
'I'm frightened.'
Of?
'Fractals. Patterns.'
Ah, says the fish, looking at Rachel with his wise eyes. Chaos!
'Yes,' thinks Rachel. 'Chaos. Fearful symmetry.'
Go home, says the fish, flipping over, flashing in light, and diving down into the great blue sea. — Emma Richler

If you don't count some of Jehovah's injunctions, there are no humorists in the Bible. — Mordecai Richler

I never really knew her," I said. "But you loved her," Ida answered, and again I wasn't sure if she meant that as an accusation or comfort. Was it less important or more important to know someone than to love them? — Nancy Richler

All writing is about the same thing - it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration it creates — Mordecai Richler

There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side. — Mordecai Richler

Mr. Bernard died on a Monday, at the age of seventy-five, his body wasted. He lay in state for two days in the lobby of the Bernard Gursky Tower and, as he failed to rise on the third, he was duly buried. — Mordecai Richler

I have always been skeptical of medical orthodoxies, because sooner, rather than later, so many of them are turned on their heads. Or, put another way, providing you are prepared to wait it out, what was adjudged bad for you yesterday is likely to prove beneficial today. — Mordecai Richler

Without a doubt, it [Canada] is the land God gave to Cain. — Mordecai Richler

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect. — Mordecai Richler

And then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate.
Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't. — Mordecai Richler

Beauty, like male ballet dancers, makes some men afraid. — Mordecai Richler

Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials. — Mordecai Richler

We live in the country, and I have a huge library there. When we go to London for the winter I never know which books to take. I never know what I am going to need. That's the only disadvantage. — Mordecai Richler

I'm criticized by the feminists, by the Jewish establishment, by Canadian nationalists. And why not? I've had my pot shots at them. I'm fair game. — Mordecai Richler

It is perfectly scientific,' Lev protests, rising to draw the heavy dining room curtains against the streetlamp light, reducing it to a glow that bleeds amber round the edges and between the panels of plum brocade. Lev turns back into the room but stays by the window a moment to observe the new play of light, the chandelier casting shards of glitter upon mahogany and bold shadows across the high brow and long sharp plains of Katya's timeless face. Oh my wife. — Emma Richler

Go home, Rachel. She so likes to to be there for his return. Zachariah is coming, Zachariah is coming! Rachel is all gravity now, nudged from dreams, a swift transition. Rachel dreams much and often. She is not hunted. — Emma Richler

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates. — Mordecai Richler

You're convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit. — Mordecai Richler

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work. — Mordecai Richler

This is an age of scientific wonders. You miss somebody so you pick up the phone to say hello. Three minutes for sixty-five cents. Nobody goes broke. — Mordecai Richler

And furthermore did you know that behind the discovery of America there was a Jewish financier? — Mordecai Richler

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it. — Mordecai Richler

Lansens is a willing storyteller ... As a writer, she desires a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported
who might sit at her knee, the hearth. — Noah Richler

Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist. — Mordecai Richler

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled? — Mordecai Richler

One final thought. In the years leading up to my trial, whenever I was caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway leading to my cottage, creeping along behind a battered, rust eaten pick-up truck with a sticker on its rear bumper that read JESUS SAVES, I used to think don't count on it, buster. Now I am no longer sure. — Mordecai Richler

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. — Mordecai Richler